Author Shakes Up Concept Of `50s Tranquility

Far from an innocent Golden Age, complete with booming economy and domestic tranquility, the 1950s was a time of cultural revolution in America.

It was a dizzying decade of social convulsion, when America produced some of the figures and ideas that eventually altered the direction this country took, both in the arts and civic life.

At least that`s the way W.T. Lhamon Jr. sees things in his study of American culture, Deliberate Speed: The Origins of a Cultural Style in the American 1950s.

An associate professor of English and American Studies at Florida State University, Lhamon debunks the established theory that the `50s lacked serious culture. His basic bone of contention being with ``those sixties chauvinists who believe countercultures, radical artistic experimentation, and the civil rights movement all began under President Kennedy, with Woodstock, or because of some cosmic consciousness which the moon walk evoked.``

Not true, says Lhamon, countering claims of `50s tranquility. Already brewing in those years, just below the surface of the nation`s apparent social calm, were the great civil rights struggles, rock `n` roll, jazz, bop, the Beat counterculture and Abstract Expressionism -- primary American cultural forces still.

Deliberate Speed, the title taken in part from the famous Brown vs. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling, argues that during the `50s important post-war material innovations -- such as new electronic consumer goods and hyper- consumption -- jump-started change in this country. The decade saw tremendous social pressures. Black culture erupted into the mainstream and the cult of youth took occupation of the land. Modern-day advertising techniques kicked in, conditioning people to buy, buy, buy, while television noisily elbowed its way onto America`s center stage.

Together, these changes hit American culture like cluster bombs, shattering calcified ideas about art and music and society itself. Suddenly, contemporary life was speeding up.

Everyone from high school kids to jazz hipsters began looking for new things, consumer goods or cultural produce, to bolster their emerging values. And Lhamon demonstrates how `50s artists responded to these challenges: most sank their hands deep into that great monolithic sludge now known as mass culture and dredged from it a whole new pop lore. Up from the underground it gushed, this pop culture, invading mainstream society through radio, records, novels, television and art.

Propelled by Lhamon`s colorful prose and lucid insights, Deliberate Speed cuts a wide swath through the decade`s cultural history. The incredible amount of information in the end notes, works cited and index, is itself an interesting romp, covering folk and blues traditions, the evolution of jazz, thoughts on Abstract Expressionism, and, of course, American literature and philosophy.

Lhamon has that rare writer`s gift of holding in hand and weaving together a huge narrative; throughout Deliberate Speed he`s able to condense common cultural happenings down into understandable currents, all the while showing their broader implications.

Lhamon continually tracks how various `50s artists picked through our great cultural junk pile, assimilating what they found and using it to create a new, recognizable American aesthetic marked by both deliberation and improvisation.

Castaway materials -- things like popular show tunes, paperback novels, folk tales, twisting two-lane highways, motels, movies and television -- were the very ingredients that such figures as Miles Davis, Little Richard, Jack Kerouac, Jackson Pollock and Robert Frank used as fodder. They recycled what they found and in the process mirrored modern society`s new appetites, anxieties, concerns and values.

Deliberate Speed is scholarly but not difficult. And Lhamon makes a very strong case for these diverse, junky American artifacts influencing the artists and styles forged in those supposedly dead years of the fifties.

It`s obvious that a lifetime of learning has gone into the book and it`s also obviously a keeper. As for the work produced by `50s artists -- ``it may not be `good to eat a thousand years,` as Allen Ginsberg hoped in Howl, but it has already served more than one generation.``

---- David Pereyra is a free-lance writer who lives in Fort Lauderdale.